Saturday, November 06, 2010

Secret for a Long Life - the Violin

Many violinists are able to play at advanced age (Ivry Gitlis, Ida Haendel and Nathan Milstein to name a few). Here is a video of Ida Haendel playing Bloch - Nigun at the age of 81. Absolutely unbelievably amazing. You have to watch the video to believe it. (Embedding is disabled at the request of the owner of the video so you have to click on the link to view it.) Violin making also appears to be a good sports to maintain one's physical and mental health. Stradivarius was still making violins at 90 when his contemporaries lived an average life of 50 something. Is violin playing/making the answer to aging? Probably, but one has to avoid travelling too much to let the magic work. A number of top violinists actually died in train (David Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan for examples) or in a plane crash (Ginette Neveu, who won the Wieniawski Violin Competition at the age of 15 over 180 contestants, including David Oistrakh the Great, who finished second).

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